Domaine de la Touraize Arbois Vin Jaune 2016

"André-Jean (“A-J”) Morin is the eighth generation of Morin to tend the vine in Arbois, beginning with his ancestor Etienne in 1704, but the family enterprise nearly didn’t survive the calamitous 20th century. A-J’s grandfather Marius, deeply scarred by his years of service in the First World War, stopped producing wine in 1922 and sold off all his vineyards except for one tiny parcel: La Touraize. From this single plot, and against the advice of Marius, A-J’s father Michel began rebuilding the estate in the mid-1950s, and A-J joined him in 1985, during which time they sold their fruit to the local co-operative. In 2009, A-J left the co-operative, selling three of his 15 hectares to finance the construction of his winery, and today he and his wife Héléana bottle the entirety of their production under the Domaine de la Touraize label.

From the same hectare of northwest-exposed Savagnin in Petit Curoulet as the Savagnin “Sous Voile,” Touraize’s Vin Jaune is produced in painfully small quantities—between 700 and 1000 bottles per vintage. Aged the requisite six years and three months in used 228-liter barrels in the winery’s attic, it comes across as fresh and lifted despite the panoply of natural-veil-derived oxidative flavors, with deep yellow fruits commingling with notes of fresh leather, pink salt, and candied almonds. It is rare to find a Vin Jaune so precise and refreshing as this, but it fits beautifully alongside the rest of A-J’s lineup stylistically."